Phronesis: Practical Wisdom for Leaders with Scott Allen

Dr. Ron Riggio - Leadership: Here's What We Know...

• Scott J. Allen • Season 1 • Episode 8

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Ronald E. Riggio, Ph.D., is the Henry R. Kravis Professor of Leadership and Organizational Psychology and former director of the Kravis Leadership Institute at Claremont McKenna College. Professor Riggio is the author of more than a dozen books and more than 100 research articles and book chapters in the areas of leadership, assessment centers, organizational psychology, and social psychology. He's served on the editorial boards of The Leadership Quarterly, Leadership, Group Dynamics, and Journal of Nonverbal Behavior.

Quotes from This Episode

  • "Leaders don't do leadership. Leadership is co-created by leaders and followers working together."
  • "There are plenty of leaders who are effective but could be better leaders. In fact, there are some effective leaders who are very bad leaders."
  • "Why do people follow bad leaders? That's a question we've been concerned with..."
  • "Leader development focuses on individual development focused on the leader. Leadership development is focusing on developing the collective capacity of leaders and followers, the unit, the team, the department." (For more on this concept, see David Day's article Leadership Development: A Review in Context)


Riggio Related Resources Mentioned in this Episode


Other Resources Mentioned in this Episode


Kate Allen :

Phronesis: Practical Wisdom Scott Allen

Scott Allen :

Hello, I am Scott Allen and thanks to my daughter Kate for developing the intro to the Practical Wisdom for Leaders podcast, where we offer a smart, fast paced discussion on all things leadership. My guests help us explore timely topics and incorporate practical tips to help you make a difference in how you lead and live. If you haven't done so, please click subscribe so you automatically seamlessly stay in the know when we publish new episodes. Likewise, please provide me with feedback. What do you like? What do you dislike and what else would you like to know? Okay, today I have Ron Riggio. Henry R. Kravis Professor of Leadership and Organizational Psychology at Claremont McKenna College and the Kravis Leadership Institute. Ron, I'm really looking forward to this conversation with you. When I think of each guest, I always kind of think of a few words that come to mind as I think about those individuals. And so as I was thinking about you today, three words that come to mind, for me are friendly, you are just the friendliest individual at conferences. And it's always such a pleasure to bump into you and to say hello and to connect. And the second word I have is, prolific because you are prolific. You have been writing at an incredible pace for, I don't want to ask how long, but I imagine it's decades at this point. We're in the hundreds and hundreds of articles and book chapters! And then the third is music. Now we're connected on Facebook, and so you've been producing some clips on YouTube, and you've been introducing me to new music. So So I thank you for that. And I didn't know that about you that you're a music fan. I am as well. So I have friendly, I have prolific, and I have music. So do those three words. I don't know, am I in the ballpark?

Ron Riggio :

Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I mean, I really enjoy writing. So that, you know, that's part of that. And, you know, I have my blog so that that fills in the time when I'm not working on journal articles. As far as music, I kind of a frustrated musician. My sister's a professional musician.

Scott Allen :

Really?

Ron Riggio :

And yeah, so. And yeah, so I'm frustrated. I mean, I've messed around with guitar and all that, but, but I really do love listening to music.

Scott Allen :

Okay, so I'm gonna put you on the spot here. A couple of, the best concert you've ever attended.

Ron Riggio :

Oh, David Bowie, around circa 1972, in the early days. Recently, the who at the Hollywood Bowl with a full orchestra. Very impressed with that.

Scott Allen :

Really? Oh, and they're still cooking, aren't they? Yeah. Well, at least two of the four. As we were planning for this conversation today, I was really excited because, again, because of the the nature of the writing and the amount of writing that you do, I really wanted to ask you two questions. And they're kind of unfair in some ways, but but I really do want to get your opinions. I mean, I asked you, I think the first question I was going to ask you was, "what do you know to be true about leadership?" And I just love for us to talk about three or four, maybe we get to five, but what do you know to be true about leadership? And so let's start there.

Ron Riggio :

Okay. So let me start off first, with this idea that, you know, we are a very leader centric culture. We sort of put our leaders on pedestals and we focus so much on leaders, what we really know the truth is this, that leaders don't do leadership. Right? That leadership is co created by leaders and followers working together. And so often in leadership, in research on leadership or in the practice of leadership or leader development, we just focus on the leader and we leave the followers out of the equation. And we know that you got to have both parties. This is a relationship and it takes both people to create leadership. So that I think is is something that we've sort of ignored the follower for a long time.

Scott Allen :

You know, I just started class and I had them read some Joseph Rost. And some of the work that he had done of moving from that kind of industrial paradigm of thinking about the great man or woman, but at the time, it was the great man, that they were writing when they first started researching the topic, right? So yes, it's it's a collaboration.

Unknown Speaker :

Yeah. Yeah. So that that's, that's first and that, you know, and maybe we'll come back to that about about followership. Second truth that I think is important, and I think a lot of people sort of misunderstand this, is, we equate effective leadership with good leadership. So we think if the leader gets things done, that's good leadership. And I want to separate those two constructs, because effective does not necessarily mean good. So there are plenty of leaders who are effective, but could be better leaders. And in fact, there are some effective leaders who are very bad leaders. And so when I think about good, I think more about the sort of moral ethical elements, and that's somewhat independent of effective.

Scott Allen :

Who comes to mind for you, as you think about these two ways of thinking about it the difference between effective and good?

Ron Riggio :

Well, I mean, if you get get to sort of classic work, and I've done some, some work on charisma and sort of charismatic leadership, so when we talk about that, well, we say well, you know that there are these charismatic world leaders that came on the scene, and we talked about the positive ones and if we go to World War Two, we think of Churchill, and we think of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, FDR. Then eventually in a talk about charisma, somebody mentions Hitler. And they said, well, Hitler almost took over the world. And so he was effective. And you know, he obviously had charisma. And so they go down that path. But I think as far as I'm concerned, Hitler's not a good leader. He was, may have been effective for a period of time, but not necessarily good. I mean, another example that I sometimes use, and I kind of do this cautiously, and he's also no longer with us. But, Steve Jobs from Apple very effective, right? I mean, under his watch, Apple came out with most of the products that we use all the time now, right? I mean, you know, and he really changed the way we received information, including music, right, the iPod was was a transformational kind of thing. And you know, he was clearly effective, but reading about him and reading the biography of him, he also was somewhat of a tyrant use bullying tactics and things like that. So I think that yes, effective, but on the good level, there was something missing. Now clearly he's not of the, you know, sort of bad, like he's a bad person or anything like that. But he just he could have been so much better. Imagine if he would have really worked to develop his followers, if he would have treated them fairly, and encouraged them rather than sort of browbeating them. If you think about that, without with all of his effectiveness, we would probably canonize him. He'd be St. Stephen today.

Scott Allen :

The Isaacson biography, and then I've watched some of the movies that have come out about him, and you're right. It's interesting because when he was when he was fired from Apple the first time, he was prickly, he was cold, he was rigid. At least that's the lore around him. And and you're right, that's a fun conversation that I'll go down the road with sometimes with my students, you know, you have someone who to your statement, bullied in many cases, or lied in some instances. And so, good leader? I don't know, effective, innovator maybe? Sure. Right? He built the world's most valuable company. And I think that's confusing for people. I think that's really confusing for people.

Ron Riggio :

Yeah. You know, and so we do have to look at leadership on multiple levels. I mean, we have to, you know, we can say, are they effective, but then were they good? And then we get into the whole ethics area, and that's always very, very complicated.

Scott Allen :

So what else? What else comes to mind? What other truths?

Ron Riggio :

Let me turn back to, and put these two together, and return to the follower. And so one of the things that's true is we really need to spend time, better understanding followers and followership. And let me give you an example of a question that puts the two together is why do people follow bad leaders? Yeah, that's a question we've been concerned with. And actually, just this week, we got a paper accepted, well tentatively accepted, I don't want to jinx it. And what we did is we looked at why people might support a negative leader, a bad leader. So, there's and this relates to what we call implicit leadership theories. So there's a measure of implicit leadership theories. And, one of the things that they found with this instrument, is you basically say, "What qualities do you admire in a leader?" and there's a bunch of adjectives on this instrument, and most people say, you know, "I want somebody with integrity and I want them to be supportive" and you know, "maybe at some level, empathic" and all of these kind of positive traits, but a subset of people think that an ideal leader is self centered, pushy, manipulative, and there's a cluster of the sort of more negative characteristics that and this is maybe overblown, but they call it tyrannical leadership, right? So the idea is that there are these prototypical ones that most people believe in, which are the more positive characteristics, but there's a subset of people who support tyrannical leaders, they want their leader to be a tough guy, right? And this goes back to kind of maybe some of our evolutionary history of sort of support for alpha males, the strongest, the toughest, the meanest, that kind of thing. And so we were interested in this, and we thought, why would people do that? Why would people support a tyrannical leader? Because most of us think the more prototypical positive leaders and so we have a longitudinal database where we can go back and we can study different aspects of these well, children then, but now they're in their 40s. What we looked for was, okay, some of our participants in this research, this longitudinal research, actually support the the anti-prototypical the tyrannical leader. And, so we looked at what happened during their youth that might be an indicator of why they support this why they sort of are counter most everybody else. And one of the things that we found, was that as adolescents, they grew up in very high conflict families.

Scott Allen :

Wow.

Ron Riggio :

So, here's the so basically our thought here and this is really conjecture, because we don't know this for certain, but the thing that relates to it that correlates with support for tyrannical leaders is a high conflict family. Now we're talking very high conflict families, right, where there's there may actually be sort of physical, you know, conflict. Now, if you think about it, and one of what, we know this, that, that when we think of early role models for kids for leadership, they turn to their parents.

Scott Allen :

Yeah.

Ron Riggio :

And so they, you know, social learning theory says, Well, you You know, we sort of model this. And so that, you know, that's one sort of avenue. And then, think of this, you're in a high conflict family, with with, you know, you're an adolescent and that, you know, they're verbally aggressive or whatever, and maybe even physically aggressive, and it's kind of conflict, right? It's chaotic in that environment. And how does the parent get control of that environment? Well, they may really get tyrannical, they may knock some heads around, right, that kind of thing. And so what we're thinking is that that might be the early roots of support for these negative leaders. You know, and there's other, there's other reasons why and there's other theoretical approaches and you know, Jean Lipman-Blumen as I do, and she argues to why would they, why would somebody supportive bullying tough guy leader? Well, because, you know, they're looking for the father figure and you know, that she has that sort of psychoanalytic interpretation to it. And, and that's not inconsistent with what we're talking about. So I think that's really interesting. And one of the issues we have to deal with and I think Jean lemon Blum points this out is sometimes the followers are worse than the leaders. And going back to Hitler, we can see that that some of his inner circle were, were more dangerous and more destructive than he was himself.

Scott Allen :

You know, what you just said made me think of an article, it might have been 1988 around there, Kuhnert and Lewis, where they took the work of (Robert) Kegan and Kegan's adult development theory, I'll send it to you, and I'll post it in the show notes. But basically looked at and tried to go and overlay Kegan's work in adult development theory with in the stages with leadership. And so it was a really interesting perspective. And I'd love to speak with Robert Kegan about this because their assumption, their perception of someone who is at the Imperial Stage, for instance, would construct leadership in their head as this kind of tough, strong man, this/that, right/wrong good/bad, kind of forceful figure. Now someone working out of a higher level of development will see the system, will work out of a place of altruism, and and they hypothesized in that article, if I'm remembering it correctly, was that it's gonna be very difficult for someone who's at that level four or five in development to kind of communicate down to someone who's at that Imperial Level. And so, it's just an it's a fascinating topic, because you're exactly right, why, why are people following - it could be out of fear, it could believe it could be that they believe in the mission, it could be that this is an archetype. I met a gentleman in France a year and a half ago. And he was actually he was a public defender in Georgia, and he'd become fairly widely known for some of his work with gangs. And I said, Well tell me how leadership we were having a breakfast together. And I said, "Well tell me how leadership works in a gang?" And he said, "Well, you know, if you go out and do the work, then you, you rise to the ranks." And I said, "well, what's the work?" And he said, "whatever the work is, you're known as someone who's going to go out and do it, and then you maybe you'll become a Double OG." And and I said, "Well, who who makes you a double og?" And he said, "Well, a Triple OG." I said, What are you, you know, but in that context, that's leadership that is, and and, and that is the archetype and that's what people follow and work toward, which is too bad, obviously, and of course, but fascinating conversation.

Ron Riggio :

Yeah. And that's part of the issue around better understanding of followers and followership because the stereotype is the sort of the sheep, right? sort of blindly, willingly following the leader and we know that that may represent some subset of followers, but there are many followers who are, who are engaged, and think creatively, and think outside the box, and try to try to influence leaders and the influence goes both ways to you have to remember, they're co-constructed. Right? So he and the followers together are causing leadership.

Scott Allen :

Well, in Kellerman's, the book, was it Bad Leadership? Where she, I liked how she broke it out where she talked about the leader, and then the followers, and then the context. What was happening in the context that allowed Marion Barry to be elected multiple times? What was going on in Washington, DC? And who are these people around him that enabled some of this behavior? And so, I think it's, I think it's awesome, such a fun, complex conversation, but I love what you're saying there, because I think, I'd never thought of it that way. That we have to better understand what's happening for them, because at least in my mind, when I've thought of fully engaged followers, I've always in my mind, put a positive spin to that. But there are people who are fully engaged, and all in, and they're not good.

Ron Riggio :

Well, so I think the last "truth" that that maybe we can come up with some more, but I think we do know what leadership characteristics are important. I mean, I think there's, there's this belief that it's so complex, and that we don't really understand what makes a leader, an effective leader, what makes a leader, a good leader, so good and effective. And, I think we really do know, I mean, I think we know that it's important to be focused, and this goes back to the behavioral stuff, right? It's important to get the tasks done, it's important to be focused on the task. It's important to be focused on relationships. And it's only going to be through fostering those relationships with followers that you're going to get things done. And you know, and then some of the other characteristics, if we talk about what makes a good leader, what makes a person of integrity, then I think we need to look at character and make sure that we're that we're not only, you know, selecting leaders of good character, but we're, in many ways, fostering the development of good character in everybody in organizations in both leaders and followers. You know, we think about that a lot. We think about the leader's character, and you know, what kind of leader am I? And very few people ever stop and say, Well, you know, "what about my followership characteristics?" And "what about me as a follower, and am I a good follower?" Or am I just a blind follower? Or you know, and we're back into that discussion?

Scott Allen :

Yeah. Oh, very interesting. So what else? What else would you say? Of course, we've got the task and we've got the personal or the relationship dimension, we've got character, anything else that you would say we kind of "know" about what makes a good leader?

Ron Riggio :

Yeah, well, I mean, I think I think you want to have, you know, a certain amount of technical competence. I think you want to, that leader, a good leader needs to be able to initiate creativity, be able to stimulate creativity. I mean, a lot of this now, I'll go back to Transformational Leadership. Right?

Scott Allen :

Sure.

Ron Riggio :

And you know, and obviously, I Bernie Bass helped convert me to that kind of theoretical model. And, you know, the idea if you sort of break down, I'll break down transformational leadership really quickly and say that, that it's a good model, may not be the the "only" model or the "best" model, but it's a good model of what we would like in a leader. And so the first characteristic is Idealized Influence. We want you to be a positive role model, do the right thing. look like a leader be somebody we want to follow? So that's Idealized Influence. We want you to be inspirational, Inspirational Motivation, we want, you know, we're followers. We want somebody who gets us excited about the mission of the organization keeps our, keeps us going and inspires us in that way. Individualized Consideration. We want a leader to build a personal relationship with us and knows our needs, knows our strengths, but also knows our limitations. But we also want to be stretched if we're engaged followers, and that's the Intellectual Stimulation. So we want a leader who challenges us. And and, you know, one of the things go back to Steve Jobs, so I don't know leave a horrible taste in people's mouths, but he was great at Intellectual Stimulation he made with it with a heavy hand, but he really did challenge his people to be creative. You know, those are four big characteristics. And we know those are associated with with good leadership.

Scott Allen :

Yeah. So let's let's switch gears a little bit. So for individuals who are listening to this podcast and they are thinking about developing leaders, architects of programming. What are some? What are some "truths" that you have in that space?

Ron Riggio :

All right. So leader development. So I think the first first step, first stage, is really about our mindset. And so we need to ask a couple of questions. So if we're now we're talking about leader development, and my colleague, David Day drew distinctions between "leader development" and "leadership development," as you know,

Scott Allen :

Would you share those really quickly, just so everyone knows?

Ron Riggio :

So leader development is focusing on the individual development focusing on the leader. Leadership Development is focusing on developing the collective capacity of leaders and followers, the unit, the team, the department. And so really, right now I'm focusing on leader development. And so this idea of when you start out, mindset is important, and you should ask yourself these questions. "Why do you want to be a leader?", "Why do you even want to be take on that role or develop as a leader?" And we know there's different motivations for why people lead, right? A good study by Chan and Drasgow and they have a scale called motivation to lead scale. They really talk about sort of three levels of leadership. You know, while I really enjoy it, the effect of part of it, I want to be a leader because I like being in charge. Another component is normative is other people see me as a leader, and you often hear this with students. Well, why did you become a leader? Well, my classmates always said, you'd perfect leader or, you know, we see this with politicians, right?, somebody in the community and they, and people come up to them and say, you know, you really should be our representative. And so that sort of thing. And then, there's the will they call it non-calculative. But we can, we can flip that around, the calculative part is, why do I want to be a leader? Well, because I realized leaders have a little more power they sometimes have more wealth, they have more control, and so I'm calculating, I'm saying, you know, it's better to be a leader than a follower. That's something that people should, you know, think about. Second thing, and I'll steal this from my colleague, Dave Day who is really a leader, development expert, he, he uses this analogy, I think it's a very good one, that leader development is like a gym membership, you know, and so you can buy the gym membership, but if you don't work at it, you're not going to develop, right? It's this, are you willing to work hard? Is the question you have to ask yourself. And so you have to have that mindset. And it's just like anything, you know, it's just like, if you're trying to lose weight, or you're trying to get in physical shape, you know, you got to work hard. Or if you're a student, you've got to, "Why do I want to go to college?" Right? It's the same kind of thing. You know, there's going to be hard work involved.

Scott Allen :

And I think at times, men and women, will literally men and women are at work today right now, forgetting that they could be working at it. Forgetting that they could be practicing. they have a practice field 8, 10, 12 hours a day sometimes, but they're on autopilot and they're just moving through the day. And they aren't necessarily thinking of that as an opportunity to build their skill, to practice, whether that's emotional intelligence and these times especially, or Inspirational motivation, to your point with working with their teams, Intellectual Stimulation - how what are we going to do? How are we going to shift where we're going to go next? So I think it's, I think it's spot on. And I love the gym membership analogy. That's great. That's really great. Because Because I sat in a room, you know, Peter Vaill wrote a foreword to a book that I wrote once. And it was I'm gonna not say it correctly, the quote, but it was, you know, an Achilles Heel of leadership development is that no amount of sitting in a room talking about it helps people get better at the activity of leading others. And, and so, I had a great conversation with with K. Anders Ericsson a couple weeks ago, around this notion of deliberate Practice. And I know in the paper you just wrote with Susan Murphy, who I spoke with last week, you know, you guys included deliberate practice. It's it's not something that just happens. You have to work at it.

Ron Riggio :

Yeah. Well, that's good. Actually, that's probably that, is that that lifespan development paper? It is, it is. Actually, my next thing is leader development. And, and, and she actually, you know, had this term, "take a long lens view," of leader development. And, we think, we don't often think about leader development. and I would guess many of your listeners didn't even start thinking about developing as a leader until they got employed, until they got into maybe a supervisory position, right? I mean, unless you, you know, went through leadership program, in college or in high school, or whatever. But for the most part, you really took it seriously when you were an adult. And the point that Susan and I were trying to make is that if we wait until we're adults to to develop our leadership that it's really too late because this all starts very, very early. And, and then related to that if we flip it around to, because both Susan and I are parents, and we hope to develop our kids, you know, what can parents do to develop their kids into into leaders and, and, you know, it doesn't have to be "leader" it could be to be an exemplary follower too. Or it could just be what can we do to create our children, or help our children become the best people, they can be the best humans they can be? And I think, when we talk about what we want in our leaders, those qualities, those characteristics, they're the same kinds of characteristics we hope will develop in our children.

Scott Allen :

Yeah.

Ron Riggio :

So there so you know, there's a lot of overlap.

Scott Allen :

We had a nice a nice conversation about even how the child is constructing what leadership means that that abused child that you mentioned, its leader, leader, "person in authority," "person using force." And that's how they begin to think about or even, you know, my daughter made a diorama for class the other day, and it had her as president with her three issues for, you know, a platform - just the fact that she constructs in her mind right now that she could be the president. And she dressed up and she did her presentation about being the president of the United States, I imagine is fundamentally different than it would have been 20, 30, 40 years ago. Right?

Ron Riggio :

Yeah.

Scott Allen :

And and so I think that that matters that has a major impact. So I love the the long lens view. I love that framing of this whole conversation.

Ron Riggio :

Yeah. So you know, I mean, that's, that's one of the things that we that's important for leader development. I think a third thing and you touched on this already, is we need to incorporate developmental theories, and you mentioned Kegan and, but there are theories of adult development theories, obviously of child and adolescent development, to that are important, but adult development theories, there are theories of learning that did need to be incorporated. And you and I are talking about working on a project related to that. And, you know, it's almost as if a lot of it, and I think this is what Barbara Kellerman was was getting at when she sort of criticizes in The End of Leadership (book), she criticizes the leadership industry, right? Is we sort of, we sort of pull it out of thin air and say, you know, here are some strategies, and here are some programs and practices that will develop leaders, and don't realize that all of that development is embedded in human development and theories of learning. And so we need to not, you know, just do this sort of "willy nilly," but do it in a way that's consistent with what we know about how people learn and how people develop.

Scott Allen :

So Ron, I would love to know now, and you've mentioned, you've mentioned a couple things that, "look we just need more work in this space." Whether that's followership, we need more work in this space. Or we need more work connecting, learning to leader development or adult development theory to leader development. What other pathways do you see? For someone who's listening to this podcast, and maybe they want to go on and they want to do research in this space...What are some really, in your opinion, ripe domains for exploration? You have such a command on this whole literature base.

Ron Riggio :

Yeah, well, actually, I'm not I'm not doing this to plug my own work or whatever plug a book, but I edited a book and actually I don't even have a you know, a full chapter in that book, but it's called What's Wrong with Leadership? Exactly the question we asked and it was Bob Lord and and a bunch of us who will Bob Lord had brought us together but Olga Epitropaki, and Birgit Schyns, and Susan Murphy, and Stefanie K. Johnson and we were all meeting on some research, and we started to talk about, you know, sort of what was what were the limitations and what were the opportunities in leadership research? And, out of that we came this book, right? And so in that book, there's a chapter that, you know, that criticizes leadership and says it's too male centric, and we've sort of left women out of the picture, it's too Western centric, and we've left for example, Eastern philosophies out of the picture. There are some methodological chapters in there, that talk about, you know, Fran Yammarino and his levels of analysis that we, you know, we're, we're not taking into account the fact that that that leaders are embedded in, in contexts, in teams, and in relationships with followers, and so it occurs at multiple levels, and near the end, and then there's obviously a chapter on that Susan (Murphy) co authored on, on where, you know, we haven't started early enough, the development things that we were just talking about. And then, it kind of ends with sort of big picture ideas of, you know, "why do we care about leadership anyway?" and "leadership for what?" Because of all the times we study, leadership is almost like in a laboratory, and we don't think about, well, why do we care that there be better leaders because, you know, we want them to do something, we want them to transform the world, to change the world, make it a more positive place. And so that idea of "leadership for what?" So I think, you know, there, we thought about all of these sorts of things. So, just to now to now that I've thrown a million things out there. I mean, I think we really do need to attend well, to followers and followership. We're putting so much of our resources, our time, our money into leader development, and not thinking very much about the development of the followers. We're sort of leaving it to the leaders to do the follower development, but to do it by making themselves better leaders, and then hoping that, it's like a trickle down effect, it's a little bit like trickle down economics, right? There's no, there isn't evidence that enough trickles down. And so, so I think really seriously looking at leadership development, how can we increase leadership capacity in teams, in organizations, in collectives? I think that's that's the big challenge - rather than just focusing on it, like we're sending these leaders to school. You know, how can we develop the whole community

Scott Allen :

Necause then at least through that lens of how Kellerman was looking at it, you know, leader follower context, maybe the followers, there'll be enough of them to chat As the leader when that individual is going off track. They have the the social capital and that they have the what's the word? I'm looking for bravery, that they have a collective shared understanding of character to hold the leader accountable when he or she is moving off track.

Ron Riggio :

Yeah. I mean, the best subtitle of any book is Ira Chaleff's, you know, The Courageous Follower - "Standing Up For, and To Our Leaders." Right? That's a subtitle and the idea is when the leaders on the right track, you stand up for your leader, you support your leader, when your leaders on the wrong track, you stand up to them. And you know, and that's the hard part. And that's where the courage comes in.

Scott Allen :

Yeah, Ron, we are going to close out here, and I have a little bit of a lightning round for you. And, so the lightning round is really just three questions not necessarily related to what we just discussed, but it might be, so what are you streaming right now?

Ron Riggio :

Yeah, well, I'm mean I stream work related things all the time, and so there's nothing particularly there that stands out. But with the lockdown in the Covid-19 situation, my wife and I have been discovered Netflix, I almost never watched TV in my adult life. Now all sudden, you know, we're streaming these shows like a broad range, you know, from Ozark, to you know, going back and looking at some early things - I'm actually streaming right now, we're streaming this old show, HBO show called Deadwood, which is about the Wild West and you see examples of really bad leadership there.

Scott Allen :

and Ozark!

Ron Riggio :

And Ozark too!

Scott Allen :

Is there any podcasts that you particularly enjoy? Or are you listening to a book, or reading a book that's really stood out for you?

Ron Riggio :

In terms of books, well, actually, I got an advanced copy of an you know, Stephanie Johnson advanced copy of her Inclusify book because one of the things I've been interested in the last couple of years is the idea of inclusive leadership, and actually have a book - I've done a lot of plugging - but edited a book with Bernardo M. Ferdman and Jeanine Prime called Inclusive Leadership, an edited book. And that's going to be coming out so to read Stephanie's and crucify was really good because she's pulling it down more to the you know, the everyday practitioner level of how do we get get to become more inclusive organizations and so I think that comes out next month that book

Scott Allen :

Great. Great and what was your quiet and looked at the Facebook yet today? What was your quarantine song of the day?

Ron Riggio :

I recycled one big accidentally. It was my daughter suggested it and it's Depeche Mode, Shake the Disease and I already use that but the idea o,f when are we going to get out of quarantine? Well not until we shake the disease. So, the the, my quarantine song of the day and in you know, given how long this may go on, I'm gonna have to really work to find more songs about being isolated.

Scott Allen :

Message in a Bottle. David Gilmour's, On An Island. We could do this for a long time.,

Ron Riggio :

Hey, send me some cuz you know what this is gonna go on for a long time and I'm gonna need more of them.

Scott Allen :

So So Ron, I said, friendly, I said, prolific and I said music. And I really, really appreciate your time today. I know that our listeners will really enjoy hearing the wisdom that you have shared. I really enjoyed the conversation, have made some really interesting connections. And that's been one really fun thing about this whole project is that, I've had really fun conversations with with individuals with multiple perspectives on the topic. And so, it's just been a true joy, especially spending some time with you today. So be well take care, and thank you so much.

Ron Riggio :

Well, thank you, Scott. Great, great spending time with you.

Scott Allen :

I really enjoyed my time. with Ron Riggio I could, I could literally sit and talk and listen to him for hours. And I hope all of you felt the same. He is just such a source of wisdom on this topic. And so, a couple things that are standing out for me. So his distinction between the difference between "effective and good." He also really focused on followership, and it's an area that was pioneered in part by Ira Chaleff, and he speaks of the courageous follower standing up to and for our leaders, and I'm excited to have IRA and Sharna Fabiano on a future episode. Followership is a ripe domain for exploration. Why do men and women follow tyrannical leaders? And that was a really interesting dialogue. I really hadn't thought about that as even a topic after years and years and years of studying leadership. And then when it comes to leader development, he talked about the importance of mindset, but he also talked about it's kind of like a gym membership - you got to go, you got to show up. And I've talked about this in the past, but do you have a mindset that really everywhere you go, you have a practice field. For those of you who are listening at work right now you have a practice field to practice leadership. And if you construct in your head, that there's an opportunity for you to practice today, providing an inspirational speech, navigating a difficult conversation, visioning - all ripe opportunities for practice. And speaking of opportunities. I'm always amazed and Ron made this very, very clear that leadership is an area ripe with opportunity. So for those of you who are practicing, for those of you who are researching and studying the concept of leadership and followership, there are so many different paths, so many unknowns, yet, as Ron suggested, there are some knowns at this point. You have been living To the practical wisdom for leaders podcast. If you liked what you heard, please share it with others and let them know what we're up to. And one last quick reminder to click "subscribe" so you know when we publish new episodes, and of course, we'd love to hear your feedback. You can stay in touch with me by visiting www.scottjallen.net or any number of social media platforms. Be well be safe and make a difference wherever you are on this beautiful planet. And now, here's Kate's twin sister Emily, with the outro.

Emily Allen :

You've been listening to Phronesis: Practical Wisdom with Scott Allen